The Religious Dimensions of Advertising in the Culture of Consumer Capitalism

Abstract

The main assertion of this book is that though advertising is not a religion, it has religious dimensions that make it a culturally potent force. Up to now, cursory mention of three religious dimensions, in particular, divine mediator, sacramentality, and ultimate concern, has been made throughout the text. This hesitation was intentional in order to establish the position that Durkheim’s totemic theories of religion were more illustrative of the function of advertising than Jhally’s argument that it is a fetish religion. Indeed, in a manner similar to Durkheim’s argument, my thesis may be accused of being functionalist, and rightly so; however, unlike Durkheim, it is by no means intended to be reductionist in the sense of a “descriptive reductionism,”¹ but more illustrative of what religious studies scholar Wayne Proudfoot calls “explanatory reductionism.”² That is, the explanation offered may not “meet with the scholar’s approval,”³ but the “explanandum is set in a new context, whether that be one of covering laws and initial conditions, narrative structure, or some other explanatory model.”⁴ In other words, my argument is more concerned with the recovery of Durkheim’s ideas as a hermeneutic for religious studies and advertising, and less with offering a prescription as to how advertising must be understood.

A profound insight has been developed in modern literature namely, that one of the fundamental expressions of sin is to make the other person into an object, into a thing. This is perhaps the greatest temptation in an industrial society in which everybody is brought into the process of mechanical production and consumption, and even the spiritual life in all its forms is commercialized and subjected to the same process.

—Paul Tillich